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John Steinbeck’s Influence as an Author

John Steinbeck’s Influence as an Author

John Steinbeck is an American author widely read n schools and by the public. He was born in Salinas, California in 1902, and documents the social conditions of the early century. When he first began his writing career in New York, he was unsuccessful and it wasn’t until1935, that he gained recognition as an outstanding author. He has since become highly popular for his work and personal style.

Steinbeck is considered to be a proletarian author which is a writer that deals with the “social plight of the worker”(Owens, p.2) Steinbeck has a keen social perception and writes stories about people. In able for him to do this, he does extensive research on the human conditions. Steinbeck once mentioned, “I am trying to write history as it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong” (Owens, P.2). Steinbeck honestly writes about economic conditions, which offers education of society. Most novels in the 1930’s are about communists or fiction, but Steinbeck has his own style. It once was thought that Steinbeck was sympathetic to communists, but really he was sympathetic to migrant labor workers, and he resented the materialistic middle-class. Steinbeck realistically portrays the migrant workers as song-willed. Steinbeck was criticized a great amount for writing the novel The Grapes of Wrath, because it was revolutionary and the first of its kind to show the difficult social and economic conditions. Steinbeck says “ The reader, he must also identify himself with the migrants, and feel on a personal level their loss, their hope, their frustration and futility, their enduring strength” (Owens, P.28). Steinbeck is also a great narrator that shows the entire picture of what is happening. His inspiration to write in this fashion came from within himself. His acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize shows this.